Cooper rides into literary acclaim

Jilly Cooper's Riders, the raunchy bestseller about sex and showjumping, has been voted into a list of 50 contemporary "essential reads" by visitors to the Hay-on-Wye literary festival.

The novel rubs dust covers with rather less surprising nominations such as Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's A Hundred Years of Solitude in the "living library" compiled by organisers of the Orange Prize for Fiction.

Only three authors - Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood and Jeanette Winterson - appear more than once in the list, which had just one criterion - the writer had to be still alive.

Cooper confirmed yesterday that it was the first time her novel had received anything approaching acclaim from the literary establishment.

"I'm absolutely knocked out, it's wonderful," she said. "I read it again the other day and I can't believe how sexy it is."